



DISCOURSE 



BEFORE THE 



Ilitekary societies Ii 



Hamilton College, 





CI.INTON, JULY 27, 1847. 



BY LEONARD BACON, 

PASroil OF THE FIRST CHURCH, IN NEW HAVEN, CONN. 



" ■ ^ J ROBERTS, SHERMAN & COLSTOX,.rRlNTERS. 5' ^"ila'P^ 

ifc^m'»b cL^M^^m 






DISCOURSE, 



BEFORE THE 



LITEEARY SOCIETIES 



HAMILTON COLLEGE, 



ClilNTOnt, JVI.Y 37, 1847. 



BY LEONARD BACON, 

PASTOR OF THE FIRST CHURCH, IN NEW HAVEN, CONN. 



UTICA : 
ROBERTS, SHERMAN & COLSTON PRINTERS. 
1848. • 



Hamilton Collegk, September 28, 1847. 
Rev. Dr. Bacon : 

Sir — The members of the Union and Phoenix Societies, through the 
undersigned, tender you their thanks for the able and instructive Address 
which you deUvered before them, at their last Anniversaries, and request a 
copy of the same, for publication. 

Yours, with respect, 

J. C. MILLER, 
H. G. MILLER, 
Corresponding Committee of Union Society. 



Ne-w Haven, January 30, 1848. 
Messrs. J. C. Miller, H. G. Miller, Corresponding Committee, 4'C. 

Gentlemen — After this long delay, I redeem the promise which I 
made on the reception of your request for a copy of my discourse. It was 
in sadness that I appeared at your Commencement Anniversaries ; for every 
thing in the occasion kept before me the thought of my own dear eldest son, 
who was just completing, with high honor, his course at Yale, but whose 
academic laurels had been won, as I feai-ed, only to adorn the brow of disease 
and death. From the time I met you, it was for months my chief employ- 
ment to attend his slow but constant progress to the grave. And since I laid 
him there, hoping to meet him where the Saviour whom he trusted shall wipe 
away all tears, it has been hard for me, oppressed not only with sorrow, but 
for a time with illness, to attempt the performance of my promise to you. I 
would even have asked you to excuse me, but a renewed intimation that you 
and your associates were still expecting the publication of the discourse, left 
me no alternative. 
With this apology, accept my thanks for your kindness and your patience. 

Eespectfully, yours, &c., 

LEONARD BACON. 



DISCOURSE 



I know not how I can better perform the service to 
which I have been invited, than by attempting to define 
and illustrate the true idea of civil liberty. The nature 
of the occasion, the character and objects of these acade- 
mic societies, and the respect due to the learned, the 
thoughtful, and the earnest, who honor the occasion with 
their presence, induce me to believe that an unadorned, 
but perhaps not entirely uninstructive disquisition on some 
grave theme like that which I have announced, will be at 
once more suitable and more acceptable than any thing 
else which I could offer. 

But does not every body know already what civil 
liberty is ? And especially in this country, where we 
have so long enjoyed it in its highest perfection, does not 
every citizen understand well enough what it is that he 
enjoys, what it is that he boasts of ? What need then of 
attempting to define and illustrate the idea of civil hberty? 
The question is a fair one, and the answer to it will form 
a suitable introduction to the disquisition upon which I 
propose to enter. 

A man may know, in some vague sense, what liberty 
is, — he may be free, and may know that he is free, — he 
may be a member of a free commonwealth, and know 
that all his fellow citizens are free ; and yet he may not 



be able to tell what he knows, or to define his idea of 
liberty even in his own mind. That kind of knowledge may 
answer well enough for his ordinary purposes, and it may 
be that he never suffers any practical inconvenience for 
the want of a more definite and exact conception. But 
when, assuming that liberty is an inalienable right of 
human nature — as undoubtedly it is — we begin to reason 
about il, and to construct from that and other similar 
axioms, rules and principles of legislation and a system of 
pohtical philosophy ; when we begin to use the idea of 
man's rightful liberty as an element in propositions and 
arguments ; then we need a clear and accurate definition 
of liberty, lest, in the use of terms the meaning of which 
has not been fixed by the analysis of the ideas they stand 
for, we impose upon ourselves and others, and lose our 
common sense in some labyrinth of sophistry. Men 
always knew the air well enough to breathe it and to 
enjoy it. They could always distinguish between air and 
water well enough to be convinced of the necessity of 
keeping in the one and out of the other. From the earliest 
ages they have known what air is, well enough to spread a 
sail and to make a bellows. But for theoretical and 
philosophical purposes, something is needed more exact 
and discriminating than this gross kind of knowledge. 
What is air — the air which we breathe — the air which 
supports the floating clouds and the flight of birds — the 
air which now whispers in the tree-tops and now breaks 
the ocean into waves ? The natural philosopher defines 
it by calling it " an elastic fluid ;" and for him, inasmuch 
as he has only to consider its mechanical properties, its 
laws of motion and resistance, this is a sufficient defini- 
tion. The chemist however, finds that, for the purposes 



of his science, this is no definition at all, for it does not 
distinguish the air we breathe from other elastic fluids. 
He therefore subjects this elastic fluid to analysis ; he 
detects the elements of which it is composed, and their 
proportionate qualities ; he ascertains by exact observation 
the action and reaction between it and other substances, 
organized and unorganized, with which it comes in con- 
tact ; and so he forms, at last, a full and precise idea of 
what air is. And that idea, once formed and fixed, has a 
thousand momentous applications, both to the practical 
arts and to theoretical inquiries on other subjects. To 
understand what air is, helps us to understand a thousand 
things besides. It helps us to understand what fire is, or 
the process of combustion. It throws light upon the 
whole subject of the winds, the clouds and the weather. 
It explains what breath is and the connection of breath 
with animal life. It gives hints and starting points for the 
iUustration of vegetable life, and of mutual dependencies, 
before unsuspected, between the animal and vegetable 
realms of organized nature. 

Admitting then that every man knows, in some vague 
sense, what liberty is, just as every man knows what the 
air is which he breathes, and which fans him with its 
breezes, — it is not idle or superfluous to analyze and define 
the true idea of civil liberty. The man who thinks he 
knows what civil liberty is because he has it and enjoys 
it, and who does know what it is in a sense which suffices 
for his ordinary uses, if he will scrutinize rigidly the idea 
in his own mind of that liberty which is the inalienable 
right of human nature — if he will subject it to analysis, 
till he has ascertained all that belongs to it, and excluded 
from his conception all that does not truly belong to it — 



may find, in the end, that he understands better the whole 
theory of the rights and duties which belong to men as 
members of civil society. 

In entering upon the proposed inquiry, 1 assume, not 
that we do not know what liberty is, but that in a most 
important sense we do know. We all aflSrm that hberty 
is an inalienable right of man, not as American or as 
English, or as of any particular race or complexion, but 
as man. I am to inquire what we mean by this axiom, 
for surely we do not speak thus without some meaning, 
and by proper attention and analysis we may be able to 
tell what our meaning is. If we do not know what liberty 
is, then surely the axiom in question, which lies at the 
basis of all our politics, is to us mere nonsense. 

We begin then with the very obvious but important 
remark, that the liberty of which we speak — the liberty 
which belongs to man, of right, inalienably, is a liberty to 
be affirmed of man, not as living in a supposed " state of 
nature," but as Hving in society, and as sustaining those 
relations of mutual dependence and mutual duty which 
society involves. When we speak of liberty as a right, 
we do not mean by liberty that mere exemption from 
restraint, which belongs to the wild savage in his forest 
haunts, or to the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe on his 
desert isle. The loneliness of a human being w^hom there 
is none to govern or restrain, and upon whom there rests 
no responsibihty towards any fellow man, is not what we 
mean by liberty. The wildness of the Australian or 
Marquesan savage — that perfect exemption from restraint 
which to men of a Typee moral sense seems so much 
better than civilization — ^is not what we mean by liberty. 
Liberty, in our conception of it as a right, implies society, 



9 

with those relations between man and man, and those 
various and complicated mutual dependencies and duties, 
which society involves ; and liberty in society implies 
government with authority to regulate, and with power to 
protect, and therefore with power to coerce. 

To those who have never taken the trouble to analyze 
their own thoughts and to ascertain in their own minds the 
meaning of the words they use, it may seem paradoxical 
to affirm that the liberty which is man's inalienable right, 
instead of being in any sense limited or impaired by the 
existence of society and government, implies both. Yet 
such is the fact, inasmuch as both society and government 
are indispensable to the existence of liberty as a right 
actually enjoyed. Where there is no government, there is 
really no liberty ; for without government every man is at 
the mercy of any other man who happens to be stronger 
than he is, or of any number of men, each weaker than 
he is, who may happen to think that it is for their interest 
to combine against him. All that is said, so often, about 
men's voluntarily giving up a portion of their natural 
liberty when they enter into society, involves an entire 
misconception of what liberty is, and of what rights are, 
and of the origin and basis of government. The theory 
which assumes that in a state of nature, man is a lonely 
savage — in other words that absolute isolation and the 
lowest barbarism are the original, appropriate, normal 
condition of his being ; and that man civilized, man sus- 
taining social relations and responsibilities, and enjoying 
rights and protection under civil government, is man in an 
artificial and abnormal condition — the theory which repre- 
sents men as entering into society by a voluntary relin- 
quishment of their natural liberty, and as instituting social 



10 

rights and social duties by voluntary mutual concessions 
— that theory, often as it has been made the basis of sys- 
tems of political philosophy, is not a paradox merely, but 
something much worse than a paradox, an absolute false- 
hood ; and every body knows it to be such. Man enters 
into society, just as he enters into existence, not by any 
act or consent of his own, but by the will of his Creator. 
He is created for society ; his nature is adapted to it, and 
demands it as the eye demands light, or as the lungs 
demand air. He begins his existence a member of 
society, under the protection and the power of government. 
The affections, the duties, and the rights, by which man is 
connected with man in society, are as much an essential 
part of human nature, as the relation of the individual 
bee to the hive is a part of the nature of the bee. A ship- 
wrecked sailor on some desert strand alone, is no more man 
in his natural condition than another sailor who has had 
both his legs shot off in a battle, and who trundles himself 
about the streets in a little cart which he moves by push- 
ing with his hands, is a man in his natural condition. The 
nature of man is not complete in the solitary individual. 
You might as well exhibit the nature of a pair of shears 
by taking them separately and forgetting that neither half 
is any thing without the other. The husband and the 
wife, the parent and the child, the citizen and the fellow- 
citizen, the subject and the state, are all supplementary to 
each other ; and the nature of man is not known till it is 
seen developed and active in these and other like relations. 
The individual man disjoined from the relations which 
constitute society, is man only in part, as a man without 
eyes, or a man without hands is man only in part — man 
accidentally incomplete. That liberty then which belongs 



11 

to man as man, being an inalienable right of human 
nature, is not the accidental and unnatural liberty of a 
savage or solitary condition, but is a liberty to be enjoyed 
in society and under the protection of government. So 
far from being the opposite of society, or of government, 
true liberty is nothing else than the condition of man in 
a healthy state of society, under the protection of a gov- 
ernment which answers the legitimate purposes of govern- 
ment. 

Having thus taken one step towards defining the true 
idea of liberty, by showing that liberty is not to be con- 
ceived of as if liberty and society, or liberty and. govern- 
ment, were opposite terms, we proceed to another position. 
Liberty, considered as a right in society, that is civil 
liberty, is simply and always the opposite of slavery, and 
is to be defined accordingly. Slavery is government by 
the right of conquest. A slave is one whose natural and 
legitimate " libert}^ has been cloven down" in some "dis- 
astrous battle." He is one who having been vanquished 
in war has been spared instead of being killed, and has 
been thus brought under subjection to the will and power 
of the captor. Liberty, on the other hand, is the state of 
one who has not been, by this or some similar process, 
reduced to slavery, or who having been once enslaved has 
recovered, in some way, his natural position in society. 
In some countries society consists, to a greater or less 
extent, of those who at some period, remote or recent, 
were conquered in w^ar, and thus reduced to a state of 
servitude more or less absolute according to the will or 
the power of the conquerors, and who are still governed 
by the mere right of conquest — the right of the captor 
over the captive. In other countries, classes once enslaved 



12 

by conquest, have been in various degrees partially eman- 
cipated by the slow progress of society, or by the neces- 
sities and emergencies that have from time to time 
compelled the decendants of the conquerors to concede 
something to the conquered. Other countries there are 
where the process of emancipation has been completed, 
and those who were once enslaved have at last, by the 
progressive amelioration of their condition, been delivered 
from every relic of their servitude. And in some coun- 
tries specially favored, society has always consisted exclu- 
sively of those who never were enslaved. Thus under 
some governments we see the absolute slavery of millions. 
Under other governments we see liberty in its highest 
development. In some countries we see a modified 
slavery gradually passing into liberty. And in others we 
see the most ostentatious liberty of one class, side by side 
with the oppression of another class under an unmitigated 
slavery. As we realize what health is only by our expe- 
rience and observation of sickness, so we form a distinct 
conception of liberty only by comparing it with slavery. 
Had there been in this world no apostacy of man from 
God — had there been from the beginning no sin, no injus- 
tice, no war, and thus no slavery, — there would have 
been no knowledge of what liberty is, and therefore, 
though the thing would have existed in absolute perfection, 
it would never have had a name. Liberty is the condi- 
tion in society of one who either never has been or has 
ceased to be a slave. 

Taking this definition, then, of liberty, let us expand it 
by unfolding some of the particulars which it includes. 
What is liberty as the opposite of slavery ? 

I. Liberty consists in being governed by fixed and 



13 

known laws, and not by the mere will and caprice of the 
ruling power. The slave, in the simplest, primitive, 
unmitigated form of slavery, knows only one law ; and 
that is the necessity of compliance with the master's will. 
He exists not for himself; for his person, his very exist- 
ence has been seized as a prey — not for his wife and 
children ; for they, if he has any in the land of his capti- 
vity, have no right in him, and are themselves the chattels 
of another — not for his country ; for he has none, he lost 
his country when he lost his liberty. Not only all his 
rights, but all the rights of others in him, are swallowed 
up in the right of the captor to the captive. The theory 
of the relation is that his will is to be simply and abso- 
lutely subject to all the caprices and changes of his 
master's will — that his movements are to be directed by 
his master's volitions. As the dog is obedient not to law 
but to the master's word — as the horse is obedient not to 
rules which his own understanding perceives and which 
his own judgment applies, but to the spur and the bit — as 
the ox in his toil knows nothing of law, but only yields to 
the power of habit and to the goad and the word that bids 
him move or stand — so the slave in the lowest form of 
slavery, and while his hard lot has been as yet unmiti- 
gated, is governed not at all by a fixed law which he 
understands beforehand and which appeals to the complex 
emotions and affections of his moral nature, but by simple 
will — the variable, capricious will of the power that holds 
him. 

The first element, then, in our conception of liberty, is 
that the freeman is governed by law instead of being 
governed by will. This is the first thing in our own con- 
sciousness of the liberty in which we glory. We have 



14 

not to ask what any body's will is in regard to our actions. 
We have only to inquire what the law is. Nor need we 
ask in vain. The law is not locked up in the breast, nor 
is it dependent on the impulses, of the ruling power ; it is 
a fixed rule, known and read of all men ; and whenever 
the law is changed, the change is applicable not to any 
thing past, but only to the future. This is our liberty. 
We are under a government not of will but of law ; we 
have only to ask what the law is and to conform ourselves 
to it, and we are safe in our persons, safe in our homes, 
and safe in our possessions. 

It is not so every where and with all men. In Turkey, 
for example, and more especially as Turkey was a few 
years ago, all men save one are slaves. All are governed 
not by fixed and known rules of conduct, but, to an almost 
unlimited extent, by the mere will of those above them. 
The sovereign of the empire has supreme control over the 
property, the persons and the lives of all his subjects. He 
delegates his power to his servants at his will, and they in 
their various provinces dispense justice or injustice as it 
happens, and rob or kill as they please, till he does with 
them as he pleases ; and then they kiss the bow-string 
which he sends them, and yield their necks, without a 
murmur, to be strangled, that their accumulated robberies 
may pass into his coffers. For another example, look at 
the government of Rome — I speak of the Rome that now 
is, the provinces in Italy that are under the secular and 
civil jurisdiction of the Pope — rather let me say, with 
honor to that illustrious reformer the reigning Pontiff, I 
speak of Rome as it was a few months ago, when it had 
the sad pre-eminence of being the worst governed state in 
Christendom. Under that government, before the reform- 



15 

ation ROW in progress, no man knew what the law was ; 
for superior to all written or published law, there was a 
sovereign will which could make the law just what it 
pleased. By a few strokes of the pen, forwarded to a 
tribunal, his Holiness, or more properly, his Holiness' 
Secretary of State, could annihilate the statute without 
even taking the trouble to give notice to those whose pos- 
sessions or whose persons were to be affected by the 
change. There it has often happened "that when an 
advocate was relying on particular articles of law as the 
basis of the right of his case — even in the third court of 
appeal — he was obliged to hear that those articles were 
no longer in force."* We will take one more illustration 
of what it is to be governed not by law but by will. I 
will show you an actual instance of the working of that 
kind of government. It occurred a few years ago in that 
part of Italy which is included in the Austrian empire. 
A man whom I have since been permitted to count among 
my friends, but who was then living in Milan, his native 
city, — a lawyer in the practice of his profession — a man 
of the highest intellectual and moral character — was 
thrown into prison under a charge of conspiracy against 
the government. That there had been a conspiracy, there 
was no question ; but that he had any thing to do with it, 
there was no shadow of proof There was really no 
ground of suspicion against him, aside from those liberal 
principles which he was known to entertain, and that high 
Roman spirit combined with integrity and force of char- 
acter, which made the government jealous of him. So 
complete was the failure of evidence against him, that on 

*We8tmin8ter Review, Dec. 1845. 



16 

his trial before the appropriate court he was acquitted. 
But one acquittal was not enough. The case was carried 
up by appeal to a higher court, and upon his acquittal 
there to a higher, till there was no higher court to try him, 
and in every court he had been acquitted. And what 
then ? You will take it for granted that he was set at 
liberty of course. You are ready to ask whether he did 
not receive some indemnity, or at least some acknowl- 
edgment, for the eighteen months of solitary confinement 
which he had suffered in a cold, damp dungeon, and the 
effects of which upon his strong, gigantic frame he will 
carry with him to his grave. No — nothing of all this. 
After the latest acquittal, by the highest of the courts 
whose simple duty it was to apply and pronounce the law 
according to the facts, there remained, in the person of 
the Emperor, a sovereign power above the law — a power 
to punish at discretion — a power that could punish not 
only before conviction but after acquittal — a power that 
need give no reason for its acts — a power which could 
say, 

" Sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione voluntas ; " 

— and by that power the alternative was offered him, 
either to suffer a further imprisonment for a long term of 
years (the length of which I can not now remember) or to 
be banished to America. He was not slow in making up 
his choice. His answer was that he had no desire to live 
any longer under such a government as that; and when, 
a few weeks afterwards, he emerged from his imprison- 
ment by being landed from an Austrian vessel, upon one 
of the wharves of New York, the first door which he 
entered was the door of the court before which, in due 
form, he took the first steps towards becoming — what he 



17 

now is, a naturEilized American citizen — a citizen under a 
government not of will but of law. 

These illustrations of what slavery is, help us to the 
definite conception of what liberty is. He who is under 
the government of fixed known law, and not under the 
government of will or caprice, is so far in the enjoyment 
of that liberty which is the inalienable right of all men. 

II. But government by law is not the only element in 
our idea of perfect freedom. The laws themselves, though 
fixed and known, and administered exactly to the letter, 
may be an invasion of man's inalienable right to liberty. 
Pursuing our inquiry, then, in this point of view, we see 
that in order to the existence of a true and complete 
liberty, the laws that govern all must represent not power 
merely, but right or justice. No man is free, who is 
governed by laws against which his moral nature revolts, 
and which his reason and conscience pronounce to be 
essentially unrighteous. The law does not create the 
difference between good and evil. Where that difference 
is not, law is a grand impertinence. The only duty of 
law in society is to maintain the right, and to repress the 
wrong ; and those whom it governs must be able to see 
the right which it upholds, and the wrong which it 
represses, or else they are governed not as freemen but as 
slaves. In other words, a complete liberty implies that 
the laws by which the freeman is governed, are such as 
can, in some way and to some extent at least, commend 
themselves to his sense of right. If the law represents to 
him nothing more than the poiuer from which it proceeds, 
— if no justice, recognized as justice by those whom it 
governs, gives it sanctity — it is felt to be oppression. 
There must be then a relation of harmony between the 



18 

laws of a people and their moral sentiments ; in other 
words their laws must be adapted to their character as a 
people ; or they are not free. The laws of a free people 
must needs be, not something extrinsic, imposed as from 
above, and enforced by mere power ; — they must be the 
product of that people's common life, the expression of 
their common mind. Thus it is, that when the laws of 
one people are suddenly extended over another people, 
the working of those laws, however satisfactory they were 
at home, and however beneficent they may become in the 
lapse of time, after they have moulded the habits and 
sentiments of the people into conformity with themselves, 
is at first mischievous, irritating, and oppressive, sometimes 
even to cruelty. Thus also a conquered nation, if it can 
stipulate with its conquerors for any thing — whatever it 
may be obhged to give up — will stipulate for its own 
ancient laws. Therefore it is, that the wider the domain 
over which laws are to extend, and the greater the variety 
of communities and kindreds to be governed by them, the 
more general must they be in their provisions, and the 
more limited the range of matters which they attempt to 
regulate, or they will be resented as invasions of liberty. 
An illustration of the necessity of this principle, and of 
the oppression involved in departing from it, is now in 
progress, on a gigantic scale, before the world. The 
Emperor of Russia is attempting to force all the tribes 
and races of his vast empire into a compact national 
unity. Whatever is law at St. Petersburg, is to be law, 
without regard to the various habits and moral sentiments 
of various communities, wherever the double-headed eagle 
upon the banners of the Czar can enforce obedience. 
Poland especially is to have no laws and therefore no 



19 



nationality of her own. The Pole is to be henceforth not 
only a subject of the Russian throne, but himself a Rus- 
sian — robbed of the very name which has come dovv^n to 
him and his kindred from their heroic ancestry — crushed 
into identity with the race from which his mind revolts, in 
the hereditary and complicated antipathy of old religious 
discords, and of centuries of mutual wrong and fighting. 
Such a policy, though there may be nothing of malice in 
it, and though it may have no other aim than to promote 
the solidity and to secure the permanency of the empire, 
defeats itself; for it irritates and exasperates the subject 
nations, by treating them as slaves. The wisdom of great 
empires, spreading through various climes, and over 
communities of various interests and habits and moral 
sympathies, — is to avoid oppression by giving to each 
community, as far as may be, its local laws adapted to its 
own social and moral wants, and to bind those various 
communities together by their allegiance to a common 
head and by the security and strength which result from 
the aggregation of their power under a common sway. 
Thus it was, to some extent, in the great Roman empire 
of old. Though the Roman law was every where para- 
mount, and though justice was every where administered 
by Roman magistrates in the name of Rome, the policy of 
Rome towards those whom she brought under her yoke — 
the policy, which, instead of impairing the thoroughness of 
her conquests or the grandeur of her dominion, bound the 
subject nations more submissively to her sway — was a 
policy which recognized, and to a great extent protected 
the separate nationality of each conquered people, by 
allowing them still to enjoy so much of their own ancient 
laws as seemed to be consistent with their relation to the 



20 

empire. So it is now with the empire of Britain, as it 
extends itself by colonies or by conquests. Each British 
colony is permitted to have its own local legislation ; and 
as it grows up, it forms a character of its own which finds 
expression in its laws. And through the vast and still 
extending realms of British India, each conquered race 
finds itself governed still by its own ancient laws, and 
counts itself therefore not yet so much enslaved as it 
might be. The strength of the British empire — the quiet- 
ness with which so many colonies and provinces and 
conquered realms, all round the world, repose beneath the 
scepter of their island queen — may be referred, in no small 
measure, to the extent in which this principle has been 
regarded. And the disquiet of Ireland, still restless after 
six centuries of agitation and oppression, may be ascribed, 
in the same measure, to the fact that there this principle 
has been so greatly disregarded. 

It is this principle, which constitutes the glory and se- 
curity of our own liberty in this American Union. Our 
federal constitution, in every thing so admirable — in every 
thing so clearly and wonderfully marked with the impress 
of the Divine Providence that gave it — leaves all the most 
important functions of government in the hands of the 
separate States, and binds the States together, chiefly by 
their allegiance to a common power, which is to maintain 
and protect those common interests of theirs, which can 
not be provided for so well by local legislation. The care 
of morals, the administration of justice, the provision for 
public instruction, the security of life and person and 
property — all those functions of government that touch the 
citizen most closely and on which his welfare most directly 
depends ; belong not to the Union but to each particular 



2i 

State. Thus in each State, the people have such laws, 
and only such, as are demanded by their sense of right, 
and are in harmony with their degree of moral culture ; 
and this is, to the people of each State, an essential ele- 
ment of the liberty which belongs to them, not as States 
merely, but as citizens. Vermont has laws to suit her own 
Green Mountain clime, and to express and satisfy the 
moral sentiments of her own homogeneous New England 
population. In Texas, on the other hand, at a distance of 
full sixteen degrees of latitude, and more than twenty 
degrees of longitude, and with a population whose man- 
ners and habits and whose relations among themselves are 
as unlike those of the Vermonters on their pastoral hills, 
as the climate of the one with its bracing rigors, its snow- 
clad winters, its brief and sudden summers, is unlike the 
languid and almost tropical air that hangs over the dark 
perennial luxuriance of the other, — they can have laws to 
suit their own social exigencies and their own sense of 
justice ; and as their moral sentiments and habits suffer 
change, their laws will be changed accordingly. This, so 
far, is one element, or at least one necessary condition of 
liberty. But if the laws of Vermont were forced upon 
Texas, or if Texas as she now is should give laws to Ver- 
mont, there would be neither hberty nor union. As sepa- 
rate and distant States, if each State keeps within its 
proper sphere, they can coexist with other States in one 
great federal union ; but as parts of one great State under 
the same laws, they could not be ruled at all, but with the 
iron rod of power. The dissolution of our Union, if it 
ever takes place, will take place as the result of consoli- 
dation and of the consequent loss of liberty. If at some 
future day the centripetal attraction of the federal govern- 



22 

ment shall have finally overcome that centrifugal force 
which constitutes and upholds the States in their sover- 
eignty and mutual independence — if the time shall come 
when Maine and Florida, Texas and Oregon, Connecticut 
and Cahfornia, instead of having, as separate States, each 
its own laws, adapted to its own social system and in 
harmony with its own moral sentiments, shall all receive 
one code of laws from Washington, then it will be found 
that those laws represent to the feeling of the people in all 
those distant regions, not right but power; and then liberty 
having perished in consolidation, the Union will perish 
with the liberty which it once protected. 

Let us learn, then, to give due honor to those statesmen, 
whether of the South or of the North, whether of one 
great national party or another, whether Democrats of 
1798, or Federahsts of 1812, or Nullificationists of 1830 
— who have been the champions of " State rights." What- 
ever of error may have impaired the testimony of one or 
of another ; whatever of faction or of pique may have 
mingled with the patriotism of one great name or of 
another ; let us honor their assertion and advocacy of this 
great conservative principle. The hope of our freedom, 
the hope of the Union itself, in which our freedom finds its 
safety and its power, the hope of the world, so far as the 
world's destiny is involved in ours, depends upon the 
permanency of the States, the fidelity with which the 
separate States perform their separate duties, the affection 
with which the people cling to the several States that 
shelter them, and the progress of the States in the con- 
sciousness of their rights and duties as States, and in all 
those institutions and improvements that can complete or 
adorn the civilization of repubhcs. 



23 

III. The idea of liberty includes another element, 
which might perhaps, by a strict logical analysis, be iden- 
tified with that upon which we have just been insisting. 
It will be convenient, however, to regard it with a more 
distinct consideration. In order to the purest and highest 
civil liberty, the community, and the individual members 
of the community, must be governed by such laws only as 
are necessary to the common welfare. Whatever restraints 
or exactions by force of law are necessary to justice, or 
necessary to the security of individuals or to the order and 
safety of the State, — these restraints and exactions, instead 
of impairing liberty, are its protection ; they are liberty 
itself. But if the laws put any unnecessary restraint upon 
the actions of the individual ; if they undertake to do 
what, though desirable in itself, can be better done by 
some other kind of influence ; if they invade the province 
of taste and fashion, and attempt to regulate dress and 
style of living, so long as dress and style of living do not 
outrage decency and good morals j if they invade the 
province of argument, and attempt to prescribe what the 
people shall believe, and what inferences they shall draw 
from premises ; if they invade the province of trade, and 
attempt to fix the price of labor or of any other commo- 
dity; if they invade the province of religion and the 
church, and attempt to decide what God hath said, and 
when and where and how he hath spoken, and what wor- 
ship and service men shall render to their Maker, — they 
contravene the true idea of liberty. Such errors in legis- 
lation are incident to human blindness groping after truth, 
before it has yet grasped and handled the principles of 
things ; such errors have affected the laws and the his- 
tory of all nations hitherto ; such errors affected the early 



m 

legislation of our fathers ; and it may be that some rem- 
nant of such errors affects our legislation — wise as we 
think ourselves — even at this day. The truest and purest 
liberty exists, other things being equal, where there are 
the fewest laws beyond what are really necessary to jus- 
tice and to the life and safety of the State. 

Not to transcend too far the limits prescribed by the 
occasion, I will only suggest two thoughts which seem 
necessary to a just exposition of the subject, and then re- 
lieve your patience. 

The first of these thoughts is — and it may be taken as 
an inference from all that has been said in this discourse — 
that liberty does not consist, as many seem to think, es- 
sentially and exclusively in the form of government. 
Under any form of government, there may be oppression. 
There may be democracies — there have been — as oppres- 
sive against minorities and individuals as any monarchy 
can be. When democracy degenerates into the sover- 
eignty of the mob, rising above all law and acting its own 
capricious pleasure, the mob itself, frightened at its own 
atrocities, will speedily take shelter under the shadow o( 
a throne. 

Yet the form of government is of unspeakable moment 
in respect to the existence and permanence of civil liberty. 
That form is best which, in its arrangements and balances, 
affords the best security for freedom. Monarchy gives no 
such security. The monarch will naturally give laws for 
the benefit of himself, his children and his favorites. 
Aristocracy is, if possible, still worse. It legislates and 
governs not for the people but for classes of the people, 
and first and supremely for its own class. It is more hos- 
tile than monarchy itself to that equality of individuals 



25 

before the law, without which there is no justice, and 
therefore no freedom. There is no security for civil 
liberty without a wide distribution of political power ; a 
distribution so wide that those who hold that power can 
never consider themselves as having an interest distinct 
from the interest of the whole people. The wider that 
distribution, then, the better will it be for the liberty of 
every individual, provided only that the masses of the 
people have that measure of intelligence and manliness 
which will guard them, or rather which will qualify them 
to guard themselves, against the arts of demagogues seek- 
ing to govern and to legislate for their own emolument 
and not for the common welfare. 

It should be remembered that the distribution of politi- 
cal power— in other words, the extension or limitation of 
the right of suffrage — is not an end, but a means. The 
right of suffrage, whether in many hands or in few, is not 
liberty, but is only the arrangement by which liberty is to 
be secured and guarded. Every man has a natural and 
inalienable right to liberty, but no man has a natural or 
inalienable right to political power. No man has any right 
to such power, if the power in his hands is likely to be 
dangerous to himself or the state. It is not essential to 
civil liberty that women be invested with the right of suf- 
frage. It is not essential to civil liberty that the right of 
suffrage be conferred on young men over eighteen and 
under twenty-one years of age ; much less that it be con- 
ferred on children. Civil liberty does not consist at all in 
the limitation or extension of the right of suffrage, nor in 
any other particular arrangement for the exercise of politi- 
cal power. Where every individual lives under the over- 
shadowing presence of steady, wise, impartial law ; where 



20 

the law is the expression not of power only, but of the 
sense of right in the common mind of the people ; in brief, 
where every man is protected in his life, in his person, in 
his property, in his good name, and in the exercise of his 
intellectual and moral nature as a creature of God ; there, 
whatever the form of government, is civil liberty. 

How plain is it then — and this is the last of the sug- 
gestions which I propose to offer — that there is no effectual 
security for liberty without a capacity for self-government 
on the part of the people. Liberty is justice — steady, 
impartial justice in legislation and in the entire administra- 
tion of the government. This, as we have seen, may exist, 
accidentally and temporarily, even under the forms of des- 
potism ; but it can exist no where steadily, and perma- 
nently, and as the settled order of the state from age to 
age, unless the people are qualified for the high function of 
self-government. 

We have a signal illustration of this, in the sad and 
fatal experiment at civil liberty which has been made with- 
in the last thirty years beyond our southern border. Mex- 
ico was at once the oldest and the richest of all the coun- 
tries of this western hemisphere. Her history, as a civi- 
lized state, runs back ages before the discovery of America 
by Europe. In a seemingly auspicious hour, she dissolved 
the bonds which connected her with Spain, expelled the 
old intruders who assumed to rule her by the right of con- 
quest, and began her career as an independent nation 
among the nations of Christendom. In her trustful admi- 
ration of the land of Washington, she borrowed her consti- 
tution in all its details from ours, and established, or 
thought she established, a federal repubUcan system. And 
how has she succeeded ? Tossed and torn by revolution 



27 

upon revolution ; retrograding constantly towards barbar- 
ism ; subject to a military despotism, in which the power 
is ever passing from the hands of one chief to those of 
another, and under which nothing is done at any time for 
justice or the common welfare ; she has permitted herself 
at last to be drawn into ruinous collision with the colos- 
sal power to which these Anglo-Norman States have 
grown, in less than two generations, from a physical weak- 
ness far below what hers now is. 

Let us take heed. If our people, as a people, become 
incapable of self-government ; if our teeming and accumu- 
lating population is permitted to outgrow those moral and 
religious influences by which the general character is form- 
ed to manliness and thoughtfulness ; if popular ignorance 
is permitted to spread over masses and wide districts with 
its Egyptian darkness ; if the people are to be seized with 
the frenzied lust of conquest and empire ; if the character- 
istic policy of our government becomes military, and the 
people fall in love with military glory ; if the profligate 
maxims by which the governments of the Old World have 
robbed and plundered the helpless nations for so many 
ages, are to become, by popular acclaim, the political and 
international moraUty of our republic, then our history will 
exhibit in due time, and none can tell how soon, another 
illustration of the impotency of a mere constitution, or of 
any arrangement and distribution of political power, for 
the permanent security of civil liberty. 

God, in his patience, favors us thus far. Think of his 
interpositions. How recently did he save us, not by any 
wisdom or caution of ours, from a collision with that kin- 
dred empire, our most legitimate ally in the great mission 
of diffusing Christian civilization and true freedom over 



28 

the world ! — a collision that would have shaken the earth 
with its thunders, and stained the ocean ..with the blood of 
fratricide. God, in his patience, favors us. Think of his 
long-suffering. Our armies are ravaging a neighbor na- 
tion, but no invader comes to overwhelm our homes with 
rapine and our cities with conflagration, to turn our hills 
into altars of human sacrifice, and to make our rivers red 
with slaughter. God, in his patience, favors us. Let us 
take heed lest he smite us in his wrath, when his patience 
fails to lead us to repentance. 



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